Enjoyable, but long ...

I enjoyed this book and was surprised to discover that it is apparently a translation from the German. It has a very English setting in both time and place. With only a couple of small irks the translation was quite natural and flowed well.
The narration was good, clear and expressive, though the female characters were mostly if a rather similar type, and the narrator struggled to make them different enough to overcome what I think are weaknesses of the text.
This was a rather long tale, long in getting started (so much so that I had to check at first it wasn't a succession of disconnected short stories) and long in coming to an undramatic conclusion that was on the cusp of unbelievability.
The best feature was definitely the book within the book which was more engrossing than the core of the story itself. This was especially well constructed and engaging.
Overall, despite its length and pace it was an enjoyable read and at no point did I feel like putting it down.

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7 people found this helpful

Depressing but gripping

A very sad story well written and devised. A real who done it with an extremely long narrative. I would read anothe by this author.

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4 people found this helpful

Well written but too much misery & too drawn out

I was drawn to this book because I enjoy the crime/thriller genre of books and had recently returned from a holiday in North Yorkshire, the area in which this book was set. The account of the first murder given in the early pages of the book accurately described an area of Scarborough close to the Grand Hotel and Spa area - which I found very engaging.

I really enjoyed some of the writing in this book; some great atmospheric description of landscape and weather for example.

However I found that the narration, although clear, was rather flat and lacked emphasis and appropriate intonation. The narrator also had as irritating way of pausing briefly before the last word of a phrase as if she had turned the page of a book and unexpectedly found an extra word.

Overall the book just felt unnecessarily drawn out. One of the reasons for this was the regular switching of one character's detailed and meandering thoughts to another's without sufficient relevance to the plot development.

There was also a dearth of characters who had anything markedly positive going on in their lives; the detective inspector was filled with self doubts and fear of failure, the principal suspect was handsome and intelligent but for reasons not clearly explained he had become a man with no successes to his name nor any prospect of improvement in his life unless he married someone with property (I didn't find this credible). The grand daughter of the second victim was reportedly a successful doctor who felt a failure in her personal life and was developing an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and so it went on.

By about 10 hours into the story I was wishing for its end - the whole story was just too drawn out and missing a strong coherent structure; I felt that the book would have benefitted from some judicious editing, some elements of joy or perhaps just some signs of hope for any of the characters' future.

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